Now, suppose you’ve created something in Inkscape that you would like to share with others. What is the best way to go about it?
Saving a document as SVG works as expected. Just press 
or choose File ▸ Save from the menu, choose the directory, type the filename, and click Save.
As far as sharing goes, SVG isn’t a bad format at all; for example, as already mentioned, it can be displayed directly, in all its vector glory, in any modern browser (except the one coded by Microsoft). However, for any number of reasons SVG may not be a viable choice in your situation. In that case, you need to export your document to some other format. Go to the Save dialog again. Note the drop-down list in the lower-right corner; now it displays Inkscape SVG, but you can see what else is available. Quite a lot, in fact! More than a dozen different vector formats are listed.
Don’t get overexcited, though. Several of these formats are just variations upon the primary Inkscape SVG format (plain SVG, compressed SVG, etc.). Others are severely limited in various ways, either because the target format is itself limited compared to SVG, or because Inkscape’s exporter for that format is less than fully developed, or both. These export formats are usable, but only if you know what the limitations are and design your documents with these limitations in mind.
Perhaps the safest export format, besides SVG, is PDF (Appendix B). It still cannot handle some SVG features (such as filters, which are by default rasterized), but for the simple documents you’re going to be creating at this early stage of learning Inkscape, it should be perfectly adequate. The big advantages of PDF are, first, that it is vector, and second, that Adobe Acrobat Reader and other PDF viewers have many more users than any program capable of viewing SVG.
As you may have noticed, the Save dialog only lists vector formats for export. But what about exporting as a raster image? This is done in a different dialog, called Export Bitmap.[6] Open it by pressing 
or choosing File ▸ Export Bitmap (Figure 18-16).
At the top of the Export Bitmap dialog, there are four buttons for choosing what to export. If you drew your image paying respect to the page frame which thus nicely enframes your art, select Page. Otherwise, select Drawing to make the export area cover all the objects of your image no matter where they are. You can also export only the current selection if you wish.
Then, set either the desired pixel size of your raster image or the resolution of the bitmap (these two values are obviously interconnected: increasing one increases the other, and vice versa). Finally, type or Browse for the export filename and click Export. (After exporting, the dialog remains open, for reasons that will become clear in 18.9.1 The Export Bitmap Dialog).
You’re done! Take your saved or exported file and show it to the world.
[6] Actually, this dialog should properly be called Export PNG, because as of 0.47, the only raster format it exports is PNG. It’s not such a big problem in most cases, though. PNG is viewable in all browsers (even though Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has some problems with it, it can view PNGs), supports full RGB color and gradual (alpha) transparency, and is just an all-around nice all-purpose format, perfectly suitable for renditions of any vector artwork. If you really need JPG, GIF, or TIFF, you can use any number of specialized tools for converting from PNG to your desired format.